Can it really be true that there's no Dream Theater megathread on this forum!? I tried looking for one and I couldn't find it. So, if it really doesn't exist, let's turn this one into one!

Anyway, what I had in mind was to ask whether DT has played A Nightmare to Remember recently. I didn't find any live videos anyway. I guess I just wanted to see Mangini playing blastbeats and couldn't find any footage of it Well, I know it's in the drummer auditions though.

I was all about Dream Theater when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

I started listening to them when a dear friend of mine introduced me to Awake. I had already heard "Under a Glass Moon," and thought that the song was radical, especially the crazy guitar solo, which, to this day, I still think is perhaps the best guitar solo ever. And, of course, I had heard "Pull Me Under." But, for whatever reason, I hadn't become fanatical about them. I guess part of it was that my musical tastes went through phases and I happened to be out of phase with progressive rock when Images and Words came out, although I had previously been a big fan of Emerson Lake and Palmer as well as Rush...

I saw Dream Theater live more times than I can recall. I shudder to think about how much in total I've spent on concert tickets over the years, but I've only ever seen a handful of "mainstream" artists more than once: Dream Theater, Buckethead, Santana, Page and Plant, Metallica...I think that's it. I would have loved to have seen Symphony X multiple times, but I have terrible luck actually getting out to see them - either being out of town when they are in town, or, in one case, getting a terrible case of food poisoning.

I saw them play A Change of Seasons with a local opening band that hung around the same circles my band did. The show was on top of a parking structure, and there were maybe a couple hundred people there. It was an incredible show - very intimate.

I also saw them at Gigantour, playing for a crowd of thousands and thousands, and that was an incredible show.

Of all the times I've seen them, I've actually never caught a bad show, but I will say that John Myung had a few minor flubs during earlier shows. It almost made me wonder if he did those on purpose just so people wouldn't start to doubt that the band members were human.

I know there's a lot of wang-measuring contests when it comes to bringing up players like Pettrucci or Malmsteen or whomever, but you can count me in with the small minority who things that these guys play some of the most tasteful stuff. All warp speed playing aside, I think 'Trutch is a phenomenal player who is super-musical and very diverse. I feel the same way about Mike Portnoy on the drums. No disrespect to Mangini, but I think it's a shame that Portnoy started clashing so much with the rest of the band and they couldn't reign him in, and instead ended up letting him go. I know that Mangini can keep up and whatever, but I don't feel the same chemistry with him, but, to be fair, the chemistry with Portnoy got weird there toward the end, as well, but I still like to think back to when the band was hitting on all cylinders, and how well it worked.

Now that I'm nearing 40 and have a baby at home and I've completed a few career arcs trying to be a serious adult, I really don't follow Dream Theater that closely. They're kind of like an old friend who used to be so much fun to be around, but, as you got older, the two of you developed gradually different tastes and drifted apart slowly, until you just don't call them anymore, but you still think about them and wonder how they are doing.

I definitely saw them on the 6DOIT tour, and I vividly remember them opening with The Glass Prison and James Labrie trying to look all gothy crawling around on stage at the beginning. Us nerds all wore the tour shirts to high school the next day and no one else had a clue who they were.

I think I saw them on the Train of Thought tour, but I'm not even sure. I'm getting old. The setlist from Milwaukee looks familiar! And I remember getting together for a concert with the same friends that year, but it might have only been an Opeth show.

I got into them by the OLD SCHOOL method of listening to random crap, just before cable internet and Napster were a thing - I was in the BMG music club, and would just order crap that was on sale in the metal section every month without knowing what it would sound like beyond their crummy one sentence descriptions. I got Falling Into Infinity that way, listened to it once and didn't know how to react to it other than thinking it was dry and repetitive (mainly cause of New Millennium being my first impression), and then left it in my car. Once when my friends were waiting for me somewhere, they put it on, and were like THIS IS AWESOME! After that I gave it another few listens and got really into it. I got Metropolis 2 when it came out a month or two later, and it blew my face off compared to FII, and after that I went into their back catalog and was a diehard for a few years. I had stuff like the VHS of the I&W Tokyo show, and some of the singles (The Hollow Man was by far the best cause of Eve). And one of my friends got the Live in NY DVD and we watched it with the commentary, cause we were that big of nerds.

I bought a seven string guitar purely cause of them, especially the Awake stuff and Acid Rain. I learned almost all of Metropolis 2 and FII and Awake from the tab books, and A Change of Seasons from some really good text tab that was out there, and 6DOIT from some odd format that was out on the net before the tab book, and I&W material from internet tabs cause the tab book was utterly terrible. I skipped most of the solos and lightning-fast unison runs and all that cause I wasn't very good. I stopped doing that with ToT when they started using alternate tunings on everything, cause F that (I had a floyd rose).

Awake is my favorite album. I really liked 6DOIT and ToT, and really hated Octavarium on first listen, and that was the point at which my fandom was ended. I've bought all their albums since, but I've only listened to a couple of them more than once or twice. The Astonishing was my favorite since ToT, I think. I listened to it THREE times!

There was a point in time where I tried to talk myself into liking DT. I appreciate the musicianship, but other than a few particular riffs and sections here and there, I just couldn't do it. I gave "Under a Glass Moon" a listen just now after seeing @bostjan mention it, and it's even worse than I remember. Different vocalist and I could have probably gotten in to them more. As someone who's spent the last week listening to nothing but Lil Baby's new mixtape though, my opinion is clearly worthless on this subject.

(I still think the intro to The Mirror, when the synth kicks in, is truly epic though.)

I too have seen DT over 5 times in concert, but fell out of love with them after college (around the time octavarium came out). I just found their new stuff less interesting at the time.

I have an interesting story regarding them and a friend of the family. Back when i was in high school, I believe I had the images and words tab book lying around on a coffee table while my Dad's college roommate was in town visiting. He saw the book and said "I know these guys, i taught them in high school jazz band." He said he had Kevin Moore, John Petrucci, and John Myung as students and fondly remembered them. He said Petrucci had one of the best ears and would spend spare time practicing at lunch and after school. He also mentioned that Myung was so shy it would translate into his playing. If they turned his amp up, he'd turn the volume down on the bass. I think those guys went off his radar when they went on to form dream theater, but he was pleasantly surprised when a box of all their music and some merch showed up one day 10 years later.

Maybe I worded that wrong. The solo is obviously great - I just don't like it enough to be worth the four and a half minutes and keyboard interlude that precede it. When I think ones I love, solos like Tornado of Souls, or Randy stuff comes to mind. This one is similar in the sense it kinds almost could stand as it's own memorable mini-song, but the problem for me is that it still sounds like a mini-song by Dream Theater.

Maybe I worded that wrong. The solo is obviously great - I just don't like it enough to be worth the four and a half minutes and keyboard interlude that precede it. When I think ones I love, solos like Tornado of Souls, or Randy stuff comes to mind. This one is similar in the sense it kinds almost could stand as it's own memorable mini-song, but the problem for me is that it still sounds like a mini-song by Dream Theater.

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Ahh, I see.
I happen to love the song now, but I felt the same way toward it the first time I heard it - like, "Wow, that drummer sounds like he's superhuman...wow, that vocalist sounds lame...wow, that guitar solo is absolutely genius...wow, this song is still going!" A couple years later, learning the song on guitar, and playing it for people out of context, the most common reaction was "...mmm, interesting?"

I bought Metropolis pt 2 at the suggestion of my guitar teacher in 1999. As soon as I got to Petrucci's lead in the 2nd track, "Overture 1928" I was hooked. I'd never heard ANYTHING like that before, it was the most powerful piece of music I'd ever heard.

I'd say the golden era was everything up to and including Metropolis Part 2 (minus Falling Into Infinity).

6 Degrees and Train of Thought are also great but just not the same...

Octavarium was pretty much the beginning of the end for me, as it seems they just aren't trying to write like they used to and I lost interest.

I bought Metropolis pt 2 at the suggestion of my guitar teacher in 1999. As soon as I got to Petrucci's lead in the 2nd track, "Overture 1928" I was hooked. I'd never heard ANYTHING like that before, it was the most powerful piece of music I'd ever heard.

I'd say the golden era was everything up to and including Metropolis Part 2 (minus Falling Into Infinity).

6 Degrees and Train of Thought are also great but just not the same...

Octavarium was pretty much the beginning of the end for me, as it seems they just aren't trying to write like they used to and I lost interest.

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I quite liked some parts of 6° and almost all of ToT, but I loved every moment of Metropolis Pt. II, Awake, and Images and Words. Also, A Change of Seasons was amazing, for me - definitely my favourite track from them until M2SfaM. When I first spun 6°, and the album started right where the previous album left off, I was totally blown away, then "Glass Prison," besides giving me a little bit of a weird vibe for being so much like "The Mirror/Lie" part 2, was an amazing song, but then the next couple tracks, for me, were not as strong. "The Great Debate" had a cool Tool-vibe to it, but I wasn't sure how to take the lyrics, personally, since DT had not really been very political, typically... Then the ending of disc 2 and the next album, ToT, started the same way - super cool. I guess it wasn't as cool when Octavarium also did that same trick, because, well, it was sort of old by then.

This thread makes it very apparent, though, that Octavarium was a big change in direction for the band. I can't even really put my finger on exactly what it was, but I agree. The chemistry of the band started changing - almost as if the band kicked its previous influences aside and started being influenced more and more only by itself, or something vaguely like that...

Octavarium was pretty much the beginning of the end for me, as it seems they just aren't trying to write like they used to and I lost interest.

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I feel the same. They had the occasional good song or two on each album (even Octavarium had The Root Of All Evil), otherwise everything got really boring. The self-titled album was probably the better of the post-Octavarium releases IMO, but it got REALLY cringy with The Astonishing.

They've been my favorite band since about 97 when I discovered them....but it's been waning a lot. I just can't seem to sit through and listen to their recent albums (especially the astonishing). The long songs and noodling (the instrumental parts used to compliment songs but are starting to feel forced) aren't really interesting anymore. I miss portnoy as well.....hoping this next album is a turn around.

They haven't released a really good album in 15 years. Count me as one who, when they got super into guitar, got super into Dream Theater, many hours learning their stuff, own several albums, got a T-shirt, seen them live in concert several times, amazing each time... and yet I consider them a bit of a punchline too. Absolutely some of the most hilariously po-faced lyrics of all time.